Breaking Records

100 Years of Hits

By: William Ruhlmann

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Hardcover | 16 March 2004 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Hardcover
248 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.6

Hardcover

RRP $294.00

$254.75

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The music industry is in crisis. Sales are down, artists restless with long-term contracts, and consumers angry at escalating CD prices. New technologies are rapidly changing the way music is recorded, sold, and enjoyed. Although these challenges appear to be unprecedented, a look back at the last 100 years shows that the recording industry has always initially feared - but eventually profited from - rapid shifts in the way music is recorded, distributed, and performed.
"Breaking Records" gives a narrative history of American popular music and the pop music industry. Organized by decade, each chapter gives an overview of the major developments, technologically, commercially, and musically, for all types of popular music making. Technological developments, from the irth of radio and the phonograph to downloading, file sharing, the burning CDs, are described in relation to how they affected musicians and the industry itself. Key performers and their major hits are profiled by decade.
"Breaking Records" tells us the compelling story of how business and art have interacted, and soemtimes clashed, through a century of new musical developments. Students of pop culture and music history, music-business historians, and general fans of American music will enjoy this account of the growth, maturation, and world of American musical culture.

Industry Reviews

"When music critics and fans debate such lofty imponderables as "the greatest records of all time" or "the most influential artists ever," they are necessarily referring to the vast library of recorded sound produced during the 20th Century. Few writers have the knowledge or wherewithal to take on a span of time that delivered everyone from Louis Armstrong to Miles Davis, Robert Johnson to Led Zeppelin, Bing Crosby to the Beatles and onward--Ellington to Elvis, Hank to Hendrix, Coltrane to Cobain. William Ruhlmann has managed, in a single volume, to encapsulate virtually the entire history of recorded popular music, from the age of the wax cylinder to the advent of the MP3. It's a truly remarkable tale, told in lively, informative prose that encourages discovery and compels the reader to marvel." -- Jeff Tamarkin, author of Got a Revolution: The Turbulent Flight of JeffersonAirplane

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